A network services exchange provider or co-location provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center or warehouse, in which multiple customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Data centers may be shared by the multiple tenants locating networking equipment within the data centers. With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, Internet, application service providers, cloud service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business. Additionally, customers may reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses.
In some cases, the communication facility provides interconnection services by which customers of the provider may interconnect to one another over the communication facility infrastructure or by which a customer of the provider may interconnect its spatially and/or geographically distributed customer networking equipment over the communication facility infrastructure. The communication facility may in such cases be referred to as an “interconnection facility” or “co-location facility.”
One example of interconnection between different networks within an interconnection facility is a physical cross-connect, in which the provider manually installs a physical cable (such as a CAT5/6, coax, or optical fiber cable) that then provides a physical (e.g., “layer 0”) connection between the customer networks for inter-customer interconnections (between different customers) or intra-customer interconnections (between areas of an interconnection center(s) that are operated/leased by a single customer). As noted above, optical fiber cabling infrastructure is typically manually installed by the provider between customer cages, with end-to-end or “home run”/“direct attach” optical fiber cabling between endpoints of an optical fiber cross-connect. In some cases, the provider uses structured cabling in the form of intermediate manual fiber patch panels in distribution facilities controlled by the provider that allow the cross-connect to take advantage of shared/trunked fiber cabling between distribution facilities. In many cases, optical fibers between distribution facilities are also manually installed per-cross-connect.
Due in part to significant growth in Internet traffic and services, fiber infrastructure in many communication facilities has become heavily overloaded to the point of exceeding the maximum infrastructure capacity available for physically carrying optical fibers, such as overhead fiber trays. An overloaded communication facility hinders additional fiber cross-connect needed to keep pace with the increasing client equipment fiber port densities required to support ever-increasing bandwidths and new generations of fiber rich networking equipment with high densities of client interfaces.
In addition, installing a new fiber cross-connect across the floor of an interconnection facility, between floors, across campuses, and across distributed interconnection facilities within a metropolitan area (or “metro”) often requires several man days of work to determine infrastructure availability and to determine an available physical path through the various distribution facilities within the interconnection facilities. As noted above, a fiber cross-connect typically requires running home run fiber between the fiber cross-connect end points located at the respective demarcation points of customer cages. Depending on the service, multiple patch panel connections are required in addition to one or more optical fiber runs creating several segments from a customer cage in a data center to another customer cage in a different data center geographically located elsewhere in a metropolitan area, for instance.
Every fiber connection is typically manually designed for specific cable routing and often with field termination of fiber end points. However, when customers disconnect a cross-connect after some time of operation, this may trigger operational issues. For example, when customers request disconnection of a fiber cross-connect service, provider technicians mine out optical fiber cables between the cross-connect end points by physically removing them from the overhead fiber trays. When mining out optical fiber cables for a disconnects, other cables carrying live traffic for other customers may be inadvertently broken, thus potentially violating service level agreements (SLAs) with the other customers and potentially resulting in SLA penalties to the provider.